Dirk Hockemeyer, PhD

Dirk Hockemeyer, PhD, received a diploma in biochemistry from the Eberhard-Karls University, Tübingen, Germany in 2002, and completed graduate training from Titia de Lange at the Rockefeller University and postdoctoral training from Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute, Boston. He is currently an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is to establish reliable techniques to model human diseases using genetically engineered human stem cell and mouse models. His research team is leveraging their expertise in stem cell biology, mouse genetics, and genome editing. They seek to understand the consequences of stem cell and tissue aging and how it impacts tumor formation, stem cell renewal, as well as cellular and organismal decline in disease. They address these questions using genetically engineered human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), as well as human adult stem cells, human organoid systems, and genetic mouse models.